Basics on Takt and Flow: Insights from Practice

Everything should flow—evenly, transparently, and plannable. Nothing is more significant for the effective and efficient manufacture of products than the generation of a continuous flow of material, information, and work. In a customer-centric company with its diverse and varied products, this is a real challenge! In a fixed takt, a continuous flow of variant-rich products or even entire product portfolios is not possible. In the first sections of this chapter, we will demonstrate the importance of a continuous flow for production, in particular for assembly. We lay the foundation for being able to explain the relevance and capabilities of variable takt in the context of continuous-flow production later in this book. To do this, we combine theories of Lean Management with current scientific findings on flow production and supplement this with practical experience from the everyday life of a production manager. In doing so, we focus on balancing of an assembly line as it takes place in practice. We extend the classification of mixed-model assembly by three sub-types and separate product variance from option variance. Finally, we illustrate the occurrence of takt and model-mix losses, which we summarize as utilization losses. We show the first approaches to reduce these losses and will elaborate on them in the next chapters.